Disclaimer: geological activity may affect features on this map

The New Zealand ski season is surprisingly long, so last weekend we headed down to Mount Ruapehu for a weekend of skiing on an (active) volcano. The weather the first day needed a little improvement - visibility was low, to say the least. But on the second day the forecast of unlimited visibility held true and much good skiing was there to be had:





There are several differences between skiing on the Alps or the Rockies, and skiing on an active volcano. First of all, especially this late in the season, when much of the snow has melted, it looks somewhat like you're skiing on the moon. There are warnings signs about what one should do in the case of an eruption (the last major eruption was in about 1995), and you have in the back of your mind the strange knowledge that the aforementioned geological activity is not on the timescale to which we are usually accustomed.